Fat's in the Fire

As the late great Rodney Delane Gleason liked to say, "The fat's in the fire now."

Goal number 14: Eat more slowly.  Says Casey Gleason Best, "I suppose you threw in the eating more slowly goal as a sacrifice to the Goal Gods since you don't have a snowball's chance in hell of achieving it."

And this illustrates the beauty of friendship. In the darkest hour of doubt––or in this case, progeny doubt––David Michael Freeman has weighed in to save the day. See his comment. Using the right brain, the part that does the heavy lifting for building heretofore unconnected associations into epiphanies, he offers up the novel and ingenious concept of 'Total Chewing." Think Chuck Norris's TOTAL Gym, and Iron Chef Mario Batali's new ABC talk show The CHEW. Voila, you have Total Chewing, a perfect marriage of the mind/body experience. Which means, Casey, goal #14, albeit a long shot, is still in my sights.

(Notice that "stop procrastinating" wasn't one of the fourteen goals, which explains why there is a discrepancy between the 69 and 40 day number mentioned at the outset of the experiment. It took me 29 days to get rolling.)

At first glance the fourteen goals might seem far less daunting than a summit attempt on Mt. Everest, where frostbitten toes and abandoned oxygen tanks are the sobering reminders of the hidden dangers in such an undertaking. But let me assure you, as a man who struggled through the first week of this experiment, fourteen goals is rarified air, where the best sherpas can offer you little more than torn remnants of colored flags (and the alleged finger nail clipping of Sir Edmund Hillary.)

The problem is that in addition to all the things I struggle to remember to do every day, there is the new pile to keep track of. One might think that for experimental reasons I would consider letting some of my more mundane daily tasks temporarily slip from the radar. Showering and flossing come to mind.

But flossing isn't something you can afford to skip. In Real Age: Are You as Young as You Can Be? by Michael Frankfurter Roizen, M.D. (I don't know if his middle name is Frankfurter or not, but I know from the book cover it starts with an F, and it seems likely), the good doctor points out on page 99 that you can pick up 6.4 years of additional life simply through good flossing habits. 6.4 years is not immortality, but it's a start. Consider that 10% of the population is left handed, like me, and if you're left handed you tend to die five years earlier than righties. So flossing still buys me an additional 1.4 years. It is during these kind of mental calculations that I'm reminded of Steven Wright's quote, "42.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot." Still Roizen's bright orange covered book is brimming with these bone-rattling statistics.

He probably chose orange for the cover because it just made good marketing sense. The Mayans thought the gods preferred orange since it connotes both a color and a fruit. Think about it: no other color can make that claim––or fruit, for that matter. When's the last time you had a sweet glass of purple? And is it any surprise that orange has become the universal garment choice for deer hunters? I assume the more intelligent and observant of the deer population are quite tickled by this.

But unlike clever deer, there is no hiding for me from my now public experiment. I must push on, and cram into my overburdened dorsalateral prefrontal cortex my 14 additional tasks. (When the DPFC is taxed beyond its capacity to hold 4-7 items, it overloads and goes dark like your house after the circuit breaker flips.)

So, at this point in the experiment, after week one, I find myself  laboring in the practice of Total Chewing, sitting in the dark and hoping with every available neuro-circuit I remember to floss. Number 14, Casey. I'm just starting to get my second wind.

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